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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FAHMRRR (Focus alternatives in the human mind: Retrieval, representation, and recall)

Teaser

Summary

\"The project is concerned with the processing of focus alternatives. Focus can be marked in different ways, for example through accenting or special word orders. Recent linguistic theories assume that focussing a phrase in an utterance shows that alternatives are important for the interpretation of this utterance. To illustrate, if I say: \"\"It was dill that I put in my scrambled egg.\"\" or \"\"I put DILL in my scrambled egg.\"\" (capital letters stand for focus accent), I do not just want to express that I used dill, I also want to imply that I did not use a different herb. This function of focus can be seen more clearly in larger fragments of text, for example in a little dialog with speaker A commenting: \"\"I liked the taste of your scrambled egg. Did you put chives in?\"\" and speaker B responding: \"\"It was dill (that I used).\"\"
In recent years, psycholinguistic investigations have shown that listeners really do activate alternatives to a focused element in an utterance. \"\"Activating focus alternatives\"\" means that listeners recognize these alternatives better in subsequent tasks and/ or that they remember them better compared to the same words if they are not focus alternatives. Building on these findings, our project \"\"Focus alternatives in the human mind: Retrieval, representation, and recall\"\" asks four main questions about focus alternatives: First, what do speakers (as opposed to listeners) do when they decide to focus a given word? Do they RETRIEVE it from a set of alternatives? Second, how are focus alternatives REPRESENTED in the brain? Third, what determines whether or not people RECALL focus alternatives especially well from memory? An overarching question binding together the other three questions concerns individual differences in the processing of focus alternatives. In the first half of the project, we were able to show that men and women differ considerably both in their RECALL of focus alternatives and in how focus alternatives are REPRESENTED in their brains.
The project is basic research at the interface of theoretical semantics and empirical psycholinguistics. As such, it is particularly interesting to fellow scholars. Still, there is a wider dimension to the project, too. It becomes ever clearer (through our own research and that of others) that focus alternatives play a role in establishing discourse coherence. That is, they contribute to how well a narrative holds together. (Not) being able to fully comprehend longer passages of texts is relevant in the context of literacy difficulties. It is assumed that one in five adults in the EU has poor reading skills (cf. Factsheet: Literacy in Europe, available at www.eli-net.eu). Because looking at individual differences is a key aspect of our project, our findings might be useful for researchers on literacy acquisition/ literacy difficulties. Focus interpretation is nothing that is written down in text books and taught at school. We see some indications that there might be different interpretative styles among individuals. These different styles can even lead to different interpretations of the same utterance. Knowing more about the different ways in which a focused phrase can be interpreted - and maybe even knowing which types of speakers are likely to do it one way and which types another, can help in teaching children (or adults) to read at a higher interpretative level. Additionally, knowing more about these processing styles will help us to avoid misunderstandings in interpersonal communication. This latter aspect will also be of interest to professionals who have to use language that is clear and unambiguous, for example journalists or lawyers. One of the aims for the second half of the project is to organize a workshop for these professionals, to inform them about our findings.\"

Work performed

The project is split into three main questions â€“ retrieval, representation and recall of focus alternatives. A fourth, overarching, question is concerned with individual differences in focus alternative processing.
In the following, the progress will be described for each of the three research questions (RQ1, RQ2, RQ3) separately, followed by the progress for the overarching research question.
RQ1: The aim is to investigate whether or not speakers activate alternatives during language plannung. We had planned to test this both in a behavioural study looking at reaction times and in an EEG experiment looking at event-related potentials. The project went slightly off course: We carried out the experiments as planned. Weobserved an alternative effect that was inhibitory rather than facilitatory. This was a clear violation of effects described in the literature. However, all previous findings were based on language comprehension, while we investigated language production. Therefore, we carried out three more behavioural experiments probing into differences between language production and comprehension and also into the role of context. However, we realised eventually that there was a major flaw in our experimental design. After three more behavioural experiments we are back on track and have developed a design that avoids all of the previous mistakes. The novel design still shows an effect of focus alternatives during speech planning and this effect is inhibitory. While we are behind the original schedule in terms of disseminating the results, we have now reliable results that will be presented at the conference Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP) in Moscow in September 2019. And we will still be able to reach the intended output of two publications by the end of the final project period. Data of this part of the project were also presented at the meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) in Potsdam in 2017 and at the Linguistic Evidence conference in TÃ¼bingen 2018.
RQ2: In this part of the project, we wanted to learn more about the neural signature of focus alternatives. The data were collected, analysed, and the paper published (cf. publications) in the stipulated amount of time. For the original study, the participants consisted of more women than men as is indeed usual for psycholinguistic experiments. Inspired by the findings from the third and fourth research question, we decided to collect data from additional participants, all men, to have a gender-balanced sample and explore differences between men and women. There are significant and interesting differences in the way focus alternatives are processed by men and women, respectively. These data have been collected and analysed and are currently written up. This part of the project will thus yield more output than originally anticipated. Findings from this part of the project were presented at the AMLaP in Berlin 2018 and the differences between men and women will be presented at the annual meeting of the Society of the Neurobiology of Language (SNL) in August 2019 in Helsinki.
RQ3: Finally, we are interested in memory recall of focus alternatives and individual differences therein. Originally, we had wanted to carry out three individual differences studies (over the course of the entire project duration). Study 1 was supposed to address the correlation between memory for focus alternatives and the processing of focus information more generally; study 2 was supposed to address the correlation between memory for focus alternatives and other linguistic abilities, and study 3 was supposed to address the correlation between memory for focus alternatives and general cognitive abilities. We have decided to drop study 2, as the exact type of linguistic knowledge to probe into was badly defined in the proposal. We are somewhat behind schedule because we needed to pilot both the target task and the predictor tasks more thoroughly th

Final results

\"The data collected to answer the question about the neural representation of focus alternatives proved more fruitful than expected. Therefore, we will be able to submit two papers concerning the neural signature of focus alternatives rather than just the one we had anticipated.
The work on the questions about the retrieval of focus alternatives in speech production and about focus alternatives in memory recall is somewhat behind schedule. However, along the way we have gained additional knowledge that will be very helpful for the second project half. Also, we believe that these observations will merit publication in their own right.
Two of the student assistants have decided to do their masters theses on questions coming forth out of the ERC project. Both of these masters theses have provided important results that will find their way into a project publication.
Another additional outcome of the project is the fact that I am co-editing a Research Topic at Frontiers in Language Sciences on \"\"The Role of Alternatives in Language\"\". In this topic we are collecting state-of-the-art contributions on alternatives in different linguistic phenomena. The professional exchange and discussion fostered in this Research Topic should culminate in a workshop such as I promised to organise in my research proposal.

Expected results/ activities: For the final period of the project, I expect the following results:
The experiments on contrastive focus in language production will be finalised and written up.
The experiments on information focus in language production will be carried out and written up.
The additional paper resulting from the research question on the neural representation of focus alternatives will be published.
An experiment replicating the neuroimaging study with EEG will be carried out and written up.
The paper resulting from the piloting for the large scale regression studies will be published.
The paper on the activation of focus alternatives (that is, the underlying project assumption) will be written up.
Both large-scale individual differences study will be carried out and written up.
A workshop for researchers working on focus alternatives from the perspectives of semantics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics will be organized in February 2020.
A workshop for lay-people interested in the workings of language will be organized in June 2020.
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